Abstract: In
August 2006, the German writer and Nobel laureate Günter
Grass caused a media-quake of major proportions when he revealed
that he had served in the SS. While the ensuing controversy
pushed the debate about the war between Israel and Hezbollah
into the background, both issues once again brought up the
problematic legacy of a past that, reflecting postmodern
preferences, is increasingly viewed as a "grand narrative" structured
in terms of "victims" and "perpetrators." Highlighting a
casual remark of Grass about his supposedly first encounter
with racism as an American POW and his failure to break his
silence when he accepted the offer of an honorary doctoral
degree from an Israeli college, the article explores how
Europe's "grand narrative" shapes the European discourse
about Israel and the Middle East.

At the
end of 2006, the Guardian's Berlin correspondent noted
that Germans would remember the year "for just one rather marvelous
thing--the World Cup." [1] Under the title "The War is Over", the article highlighted some
of the World Cup's aspects that doubtlessly were appreciated
even by those (relatively few) Germans who couldn't care less
about football: the country had shown for all the world to
see that it had emerged from the shadows of its past--Germans
could wave their flag and cheer their national team without
projecting anything but a harmless, infectious enthusiasm for
a popular sport.

Among
the fans watching the World Cup was the famous German author
and Nobel laureate Günter Grass. The almost 80-year-old
writer had just finished his latest book, an autobiographical
work about his youth that was due to be published a few weeks
after the World Cup. He had also been offered an honorary doctoral
degree from an Israeli college, and in between watching the
World Cup matches and reading the proofs for his book, he made
time to meet the representatives of Netanya Academic College.

It
was reportedly a pleasant meeting that took place at Grass's
home near Lübeck in northern Germany. The Nobel laureate
told his guests that he was happy to accept the honor offered
to him and that he looked forward to visit Israel for an official
ceremony that would be organized by the college. But Günter
Grass did not tell his guests what he would tell an interviewer
a few weeks later: his forthcoming autobiography Peeling
the Onion[2] would
reveal a secret that he had kept for more than sixty years.
The secret was a most unexpected one from a man like Grass
who had spent a lifetime speaking out passionately about the
need for Germans to face up to their Nazi past. The secret
was that Günter Grass himself had kept silent for more
than sixty years about his own service in the SS.

It
quickly became clear that the young Grass had been drafted
for service in the Waffen-SS towards the end of the war, and
that he had not been involved in any of the atrocities committed
by Himmler's notorious organization. Yet, it was unavoidable--and
some thought, calculated--that his confession caused a media-quake
of major proportions that would reverberate for months throughout
Germany and even in the European and international press. The
history that during the World Cup had seemed just a faded memory
was back in the headlines again.

But
it was not just the confession of Nobel laureate Günter
Grass that forced Germans in mid-August 2006 to once again
confront their past. The summer's war between Israel and Lebanon's
Hezbollah had already brought back the sensitive question of
whether Germans could feel as free as others to criticize Israel's
conduct. Yet, this debate was quickly drowned out by the flood
of editorials, commentary and TV programs that covered any
conceivable reaction to Grass's confession and tried to square
the rather belated revelation with the writer's lifelong pose
as a righteous leftist.

In
the respected Süddeutsche Zeitung, two younger
writers soon issued an exasperated "plea for less Grass and
more debate on the Middle East."[3] Protesting
that the generation of Grass was dominating the political discourse,
they criticized that "all express their understanding, their
consternation, their disappointment, even their nausea--none
of them is under 75. A class reunion of old German intellectuals
who feel chronically inclined or obliged to enlighten us on
the same topic: Hitler and me.[...] It's shameful that within
three days, the Grass affair has elicited more statements and
morally-grounded positions from German writers and thinkers
than the war in northern Israel and southern Lebanon did in
the 33 days prior."

There
was another aspect of the frenzy surrounding Grass's revelation
that was perhaps no less "shameful" and certainly no less telling:
In the lengthy interview before the publication of his book,
Grass had smugly recalled how he, a young SS recruit who was
held as a POW by American forces, encountered "direct racism" for
the very first time when he witnessed the discrimination of
black soldiers in the US Army.[4] It was a rather casual remark, and among German
commentators, it went largely unnoticed.

But
the Wall Street Journal picked it up for what it was:
an editorial noted with some sarcasm that, growing up in Nazi
Germany, the young Grass should have had a few opportunities
to notice racism prior to his capture by American forces. Describing
the Nobel laureate as "a darling of the anti-American and anti-globalization
set," the editorial concluded that SS-recruit Grass "felt morally
superior to those damn Yanks, and he still does six decades
later"--all of which earned him, in a pun on his most famous
novel, the designation "Tin Moralist."[5]

A
Hungarian commentator highlighted another aspect: the public
intellectual Grass, who claimed to speak with the authoritative
voice of moral indignation on Germany's past and present, had
obviously failed to notice in his youth that Jews were disappearing;
sixty years later, he was an outspoken critic of America, but
had once again nothing to say about the threats of the Iranian
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.[6]

There
was indeed something very characteristic in the casual and
smug way in which Grass had recalled his first encounter with "direct
racism," and the incident--as well as the fact that it was
barely noted in the flood of commentary that engulfed Europe's
media in the aftermath of Grass's belated confession--may well
serve as an illustration of a crucial mechanism that shapes
the views of Europe's elites not only about America, but also
about Israel.

Europe
has come a long way in its approach to the country that was
established because of the very direct racism that went unnoticed
by the young SS recruit Günter Grass. Guilt-ridden support
for the state of the Holocaust's survivors has given way to
sharply critical attitudes that do not always stop short of
accusing Israel of crimes as evil as those committed against
European Jewry. Neither Israelis nor pro-Israel advocacy groups
seem quite to understand what feeds the hostility that they
see coming from Europe: the countless calls to boycott Israeli
academia, films, exhibitions, companies, and products; the
threats to try Israeli army personnel and Israeli politicians
for war crimes, and, beyond calls and threats, actual measures
like the ban that prohibits refueling stops of El Al planes
with military cargo in several European countries, Germany
among them. Equally hard to understand is how those who used
to fervently endorse the pledge of "Never Again" would remain
somewhat aloof when the call to wipe Israel off the map was
issued from Teheran. Eyebrows were raised, dismay was expressed,
but in the end the response remained muted, and neither the
intellectual nor the political debate took much notice of the
existential threat that a nuclear Iran poses for Israel.

But
perhaps Europe simply sees little reason to worry about existential
threats to Israel--after all, in the fall of 2003, a survey
in the European Union revealed that 59 percent of Europeans
regarded Israel as a greater threat to world peace than Iran.
As always in situations like this, Israeli media and international
organizations like the Anti-Defamation League blamed latent
antisemitism for European hostility towards Israel. But this
well-worn explanation fails to grasp the formative forces that
are shaping European public opinion. In this context, Grass's
casual remark about his first encounter with "direct racism" may
be paradigmatic: Obviously a young man who grew up in Nazi
Germany and went through SS training did not encounter "direct
racism" for the first time when he witnessed the discrimination
of black servicemen in the US Army, but doubtlessly that was
the first time Grass noticed racism. His sensitivity to manifestations
of racism might have been enhanced by his "demotion" from being
a member of what he perceived to be SS elite troops to being
a prisoner of war, in other words: from being a potential perpetrator
to being a potential victim.

Some
sixty years later, Günter Grass seems to have devoted
precious little effort to questioning his perceptions or the
notions that were formed on the basis of these perceptions.
It is the narrative that preoccupies him--and it is narratives
that preoccupy the political discourse in postmodern Europe.

In
the prosperous and largely peaceful environment that Europe
has provided for its citizens in the past few decades, the
horrors of the 1930s and 1940s have receded into history. While
the Holocaust is obviously still widely regarded as part of
a traumatic and formative past, prevailing postmodern preferences
have shaped the discourse about this past. On the one hand,
the Holocaust has given rise to a "grand narrative" that structures
European perceptions of the past and present in terms of "victims" and "perpetrators." On
the other hand, the postmodern perspective which views the
legacy of the Holocaust as a narrative construct has diminished
the acceptance of interpretations that tied European, and particularly
German, guilt for the destruction of European Jewry to the
establishment of Israel and required a basically positive view
of the Jewish state. After decades of diligent Vergangenheitsbewältigung--that
quintessentially German construct describing the process of
coming to terms with the past--Germans and Europeans alike
feel that they have graduated beyond the constraints of "political
correctness" in the discourse about Israel. At the same time,
this discourse reflects Europe's grand narrative and is thus
generally still conducted within the coordinates set by the
categories of the "victim" and the "perpetrator." The perception
that, in the case of Israel, the state and the people that
had been accorded unquestioning victim status have become perpetrators
makes this discourse particularly resistant to voices that
speak for a country that wants to be neither victim nor perpetrator.

Europe's
tendency to now overcompensate for the previous "political
correctness" towards Israel also has to be understood in the
context of the current challenges that are posed by the radicalization
of Muslim minorities in Europe and the related threats to social
peace and public security. Faced with these problems, Europe
has, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, experienced
a sense of being threatened. In a somewhat paradoxical switch
of roles, the political right tends to interpret that threat
within a conceptual framework that conjures the specter of
the rise of a new fascism; by contrast, the political center
and left resolutely reject any attempts to look for parallels
in the past and insist that the present policies of the US
and Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories are the
major factors that cause the radicalization of Muslim populations.
What seems to be rarely noted in the European discourse is
that this view echoes quite uncritically the narrative that
has been instrumentalized for decades in the Muslim world to
channel popular dissatisfaction with repressive and stagnant
regimes.

Thus,
the publication of a statement of support for Günter Grass
by 46 Arab intellectuals, who dismissed criticism against the
writer as a ploy to divert attention from the crimes of Israeli "neo-Nazis," may
have been an embarrassing show of solidarity, but it was not
necessarily a completely undeserved one.[7] The Neue Zürcher Zeitung that carried
the report noted critically that the statement reflected an
intellectual discourse divorced from reality, feeding on slogans,
empty rhetoric, and conspiracy theories. This criticism may
not only apply to the intellectual discourse in the Arab world.

The
dichotomy between the role of the victim and the perpetrator
that dominates the discourse about Israel in Europe and elsewhere
reflects perhaps a deep-seated human longing for morality and
justice. However, as the example of Günter Grass might
illustrate, the human experience is more ambiguous: what would
have happened if he had been just one year older, and had been
drafted earlier in the war? Would his misguided youthful idealism
have made him a willing perpetrator, or would he have refused
participation in murderous SS commandos, and have become a
victim? And what would have happened to a Jewish US soldier
taken prisoner by Grass and his comrades? Futile questions
perhaps, and Grass himself seems either never to have wondered
about them, or is simply all too sure of the answers.

Against
this background, it is interesting to note that Tom Segev,
in an article in Haaretz,[8] still thought that Israelis should
appreciate the positive response of Grass to the offer by Netanya
Academic College, because "Israel these days is not a major
source of attraction for people who stand for the values of
justice and human rights, even if they're German." After the
interview in which Grass revealed that he had served in the
SS, the college requested and received from Grass a letter
of explanation--which clearly was formulated with German public
opinion in mind--but eventually it was decided to "defer" the
granting of the honorary degree to Grass. However, Segev suggested
that Grass should perhaps still be invited at some point to
Netanya, so that Israelis would have a chance to hear "what
a person like him ought to say about the occupation and the
oppression in the territories."

Just
a few days after Segev's article appeared, Israelis actually
did get a chance to hear something that was probably not far
from what Grass would say: considering what is known about
the views held by Grass, it is safe to assume that he would
largely agree with the positions expressed by a group of mostly
German academics who, in mid-November 2006, published a "manifesto" demanding
a re-evaluation of the "special" relationship between Germany
and Israel.[9] Under the title "Friendship and Criticism", the authors devote
considerable room to assuring readers of their friendship for
Israel, but they reject the notion that Germany's past requires
them to uncritically support Israel; at the same time, the
manifesto repeatedly invokes the need, even the duty, for "special
sensitivity."

Unfortunately,
the manifesto shows little evidence of "special sensitivity";
indeed, it would rather seem that there is "special insensitivity" when
the manifesto echoes some of the favorite lines of such "friends" of
Israel as the Iranian president. Just like Ahmadinejad, the
manifesto's authors seem to regard the establishment of the
State of Israel as a historic injustice against the Arabs: "It
is the Holocaust that has, for six decades, caused the continuous,
and currently even unbearable, suffering of the Palestinians.[...]
countless dead, families torn apart, expulsion, and life in
make-shift housing up to today have been the consequence." The
text continues to argue that, without the Holocaust, Israel
would not feel justified to ignore so intransigently the human
rights of Palestinians and Lebanese, and without the Holocaust,
Israel would not be backed in this--materially and politically--by
the US.

By
arguing that Israel owes its existence exclusively or primarily
to the Holocaust, the authors of the manifesto seem to deny
that Zionism was a legitimate quest for a Jewish homeland.
Indeed, the manifesto emphasizes that the UN decision to "accept" the
establishment of the State of Israel was taken still under
the "shock" of the Holocaust and "against the Arab states." According
to the manifesto, the Middle East conflict has German and European
roots, and it was no fault of the Palestinians that "a part
of the European problems was transferred to the Middle East." Obviously,
this has been said before in Farsi and in Arabic.

There
is equally little "special sensitivity" when the manifesto's
authors declare that they are "convinced" that Jewish intellectuals
like Adorno, Einstein, Freud, Marx and Zweig--"of whom we are
so proud and without whom German culture and the German contribution
to the sciences would be so much poorer"--would subscribe to
the principle that only respect for equality, human rights
and international law can guarantee peace and the continued
existence and security of Israel, Jews in the Diaspora, and
the future Palestinian state.

It
is indeed likely that these German-Jewish intellectuals would
have agreed with this principle, but the problem that is overlooked
by the professors who authored the manifesto is that there
has been historically a severe shortage of Arab-Muslim intellectuals
who agree with this principle. In fact, not long before the
publication of the manifesto, the Berliner Zeitung carried
an article by an Iraqi-born writer who discussed the "Two faces
of Arab Intellectuals" and criticized that Arab intellectuals
would routinely condemn terrorist attacks in English, German,
or French, and praise them in Arabic.[10]

However,
the authors of the manifesto clearly prefer to focus on what
can be criticized about Israel. While there are unequivocal
condemnations of suicide attacks and the launching of Qassam
rockets, the manifesto leaves little doubt that it is the suffering
inflicted by Israel on Palestinians and Lebanese that is "unbearable." Notwithstanding
all the reaffirmations of friendship for Israel, the nine pages
of the manifesto paint Israel as the victims' state that has
become a cruel perpetrator, cynically trampling human rights
and dignity in its lust for land, a mighty militaristic monster,
propped up by 20 percent of America's foreign aid budget, oppressing,
terrorizing and killing Palestinians and Lebanese at will.

It
is simply remarkable with how much righteousness European intellectuals
feel entitled to criticize Israel based on a simplistic view
of the Middle East conflict that ultimately reflects Europe's "grand
narrative" of victims and perpetrators. Europe's image of Israel
is central for European perceptions of the Middle East: torn
between feelings of obligation from their historic guilt and
resentment arising from the often unacknowledged notion that
the Jewish state has to prove that it is indeed a worthy guardian
of whatever might be defined as the "legacy" of the Holocaust,
Europeans feel increasingly justified in condemning Israel
as racist, militaristic, oppressive, and generally malevolent.
Perhaps one should also not underestimate the power of the
associations triggered whenever the issue of Israel's occupation
of Palestinian territories comes up: when the French hear "occupation",
they think of the Nazi occupation of France, not of their own
colonial rule in North Africa and elsewhere; and when the Germans
hear "occupation", they think of the Allied occupation of Germany,
not of the Nazi occupation of much of Europe. Thus, Israel
becomes the greatest threat to world peace, and the Star of
David somehow gets distorted into a swastika. And since Europe's
grand narrative assigns the role of the perpetrator to Israel,
the role that remains for the rest of the Middle East is that
of the victim.

Yet,
when Europeans, and certainly Germans, look at themselves,
the dichotomy between the victim and the perpetrator all but
dissolves. The story of Günter Grass is paradigmatic:
as we learn from his autobiography, the young SS recruit "somehow" managed
before his capture to strip off his SS uniform and change into
a more innocuous Army uniform; with equal ease, he managed
to strip off his role as a potential perpetrator and change
into a potential victim by taking offense at the discrimination
of black US soldiers. And while it would be just a strange
historical coincidence if--as Grass has implied--the German
Nobel laureate and the German Pope really came to know each
other as POWs in an allied camp, it may be less of a coincidence
that the Pope suggested in a speech in May 2006 at Auschwitz
that the Nazis had been "a ring of criminals" that "used and
abused" the Germans, and that the Shoah was "ultimately" directed
against the sources of the Christian faith.[11]

Coming
to terms with the past for many meant not only acknowledging
guilt, repenting, paying reparations, and building memorials,
but also working up the courage to say: "we were victims, too"--because
the perpetrators were "a ring of criminals" that victimized
the rest of Germany and Europe. Not surprisingly, one literary
critic commented that Grass narrated his memories in a way
that made it "comfortable" to recall life in the former Reich
territories: "West and East Prussia re-emerge from the fog
of the Cold War, reflections about expulsion can take place
under his watchful eye and it's even acceptable for the Germans
to be victims too."[12]

Like
the Guardian's Berlin correspondent, many Germans seem
to feel that "the war is over", that it is time to see Germany
untainted by its past. Having graduated from a lengthy, though
not always entirely voluntary process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung,
many also seem to feel that they can claim a moral superiority
that entitles them to judge the Middle East conflict all the
more harshly. A decidedly nonconformist German voice--the author
and songwriter Wolf Biermann--summed it all up in his characteristically
polemic way:

Three
decades after the Holocaust, the Germans had just about
forgiven the Jews for what they'd done to them. But now
the perpetrators are becoming increasingly ungracious
towards this hopeless ongoing conflict of their victims.
Again and again I hear the cold-hearted argument: these
Jews must have learnt what oppression is at the Nazi
school of hard knocks. Precisely! Which is why I cold-heartedly
counter, having learnt their Shoah lesson, the survivors
have no desire to get slaughtered all over again.[13]

About
the AuthorPetra Marquardt-Bigman is a freelance writer and researcher
with a Ph.D. in contemporary history. She has published a book
and a number of articles on American intelligence on Germany
during and after World War II; her current work focuses on Europe's
political discourse about Israel and the Middle East conflict,
and she is writing a related blog, "The Warped Mirror", at the
Jerusalem Post's Blogcentral site.